 | | A bus arriving at Patrick O'Hearn Elementary School in Boston on Sept. 9, 1971. Sam Masotta/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images | |
| Natchitoches Central High School (Natchitoches, La.) |
| Joe Weinmunson grew up in rural Louisiana in an area where a busing decree was enforced in the 1980s. Mr. Weinmunson, who is white, wrote that busing "was one of the best things that could have happened for me." |
| Mr. Weinmunson attended Natchitoches Central High School from 1983 to 1987. "Each community had its own small K through 12 school. I was a white city boy who moved to the country to help care for my aging grandparents and their land. My school did nothing to dispel the worst concepts of poor, rural whites: insular, conservative, friendly enough as long as you were one of them." |
| One year later, he was glad when he started to attend more integrated schools, "especially when I went to the big parish high school with a great band program," he wrote. "I spent far more time on the school bus than I ever wanted to, but the people and experiences I was exposed to were worth the dreary rides." |
| Overbrook High School (West Philadelphia, Pa.) |
A group photo of the graduates of Overbrook High School, in 1941.
Afro American Newspapers/Gado, via Getty Images |
| Frederick Douglass Alcorn, is a 70-year-old veteran who lives in Renton, Wash. He wrote that he went to Overbrook High School from 1963 to 1966. The experience "did very little to advance the intention of integration," wrote Mr. Alcorn, who is African-American. "The curriculum was Eurocentric and patriotic to an unexplained history of enslavement and conquest." |
| Students self-segregated outside of the classroom, except for in sports, he added. They were also academically tracked to different floors of the school "which quietly promoted degrees of classism among black students." The teachers were primarily white, and those students who were not considered college-bound were taught a curriculum that did not prepare them to go to college. |
| Mr. Alcorn wrote that he did not study geometry in his math class. He had been assigned to special education in elementary school because of his black English and southern accent. That decision "has impacted me until this day," he wrote. |
| George Washington High School (Denver) |
A discussion group at George Washington High School, in 1970.
Denver Post/Getty Images |
| Peter Hornbein described the impact that busing had on his life as "profound." He wrote: "I found and made friends from different races and backgrounds; yet I also observed acts of racism and nativism." |
| The racism he witnessed was both covert and overt, but busing "opened my eyes to the impact of systemic racism," added Mr. Hornbein, who is white and went to George Washington High School from 1968 to 1971. |
| Mr. Hornbein remembers a friend from elementary school who identified as Chicana. She "put me in my place in seventh grade when I boasted about how I was a third-generation Coloradan," he wrote. "She noted that her family had been in Colorado since the time when Colorado was part of Mexico." That same friend, he added, was taunted by other Chicano and Latin students who were bused in from other schools and who spoke Spanish when she did not. |
| "Through my interactions with my friends of color, I came to understand that, although we Jews had suffered because of racism, nativism, and anti-Semitism, we had become white," Mr. Hornbein wrote. "We served an economic purpose in this country, but always had the 'promise' of assimilation. Other populations of color never had and still do not have the promise of assimilation; they are and will continue to be oppressed." |
| To read more stories from Race/Related readers on busing, click here. |
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